Nintendo has a history of getting absolutely unoriginal stuff patented. Many of the patents for the Wii controller algorithms made claims already covered by well established and published techniques. "Someone at the patent office got a Wii for their birthday," one of my fellows quipped.
I guess you could argue that Nintendo's patents are really no worse (or better) than the existing practice of filing for software patents, namely "claim the sun and the moon" to get trading cards for the sword-rattling contest [sorry about mixing metaphors...]
Software patents are a circular firing squad that we should just stop. The patent office has proved itself utterly incompetent to judge their merit, and these patents -- far from protecting innovation -- can only do harm in the hands of trolls, lawyers with prosthetic morals and large corporations.